The best teaching that I have ever done has always been set up just beyond the edge of what I actually understand. You’ll hardly be surprised to learn, then, that I am in love with the idea of this blog. Charles does know a thing or two about comics, but he’s starting this blog conversation about the course not with what he knows, but with where he knows he’s going to have problems. It’s sick; it’s beautiful. I love it.

As fate would have it, I happen to be in a very good situation to think about what can go wrong teaching childhood and comics. I’ve just relocated to Cambridge, where the teaching is very, very different from what I’ve done (and experienced) in every other classroom.

The number one problem that I keep experiencing is that when the nature of the course wants us to lecture about the center, the books that Have To Be Known, then that nature is insistently nudging us away from the rich work done by people on the margins.

For me, this urge toward the center is constant because at Cambridge we teach in a model that might best be understood as serial guest lecturing. Students have a different instructor almost every week, and once I have taught my subject, it might well never come up again for the rest of the term—indeed, the rest of the year. I have about two hours to give the students a fiery introduction to the material that will drive them to go educate themselves about the subject once I’m gone. If I can only ask them to read one book to prepare for my day in front of them, don’t I have to assign them the most canonical, traditional, familiar, central…let’s call it what it is: White…text possible?

And Charles isn’t going to find the challenge much easier. Yes, he has the same students for a few months, so with some judicious selection, he can assign both the center and the margin. But there will be times when the nature of the subject seems to insist on safe, familiar choices.

For example, while talking about the Comics Code, which was developed by influential White businessmen to protect their interests by playing to 1950s sensibilities of American middle-class propriety, how will he escape a reading list that is White, White, White? The men whose comics sparked the outrage were White; the public intellectual at the center of the debate was White; the men who wrote the Code were White; the books that thrived under the new regime were White. What reading material central to this history will be about anything but Whiteness?

Or how about teaching the origins of cartooning? The most common version of the history of comics is populated by White Europeans who had access to the training and venues of publication necessary for a career as a public artist. I’m uncomfortable (to put it mildly) with a module featuring only them, but what are you going to do, not teach the center?

These problems arise from comics as a subject matter, but there’s another problem rooted even more deeply in the specific aspect of contexts that Charles has chosen. The title of the course pinpoints "childhood," yes? Childhood’s close association with innocence, which is itself associated with Whiteness (if you don’t believe me, ask Robin Bernstein), is going to make straying from the center even more problematic. Here, as above, the enemy he faces is the nature of the subject.

But there is another potential enemy. If—or, knowing Charles, when is the more appropriate word—he edges the reading list and classroom conversation away from innocence, will his students still recognize what they are reading as children’s comics? It’s not just the institution and the subject matter that insist on staying safely in the zone of the canonical…it’s frequently the students as well. So will his students resist when the reading list includes perspectives that don’t fit with the general notion of lily-White childhood?

Charles asked me here only to point out his looming problems, but I feel some tiny obligation to offer some possible solutions, too. For example, when teaching the origins of comics, it might do to teach a competing theory, namely the theory that what we call comics today owes a debt to thirteenth-century Japanese art. Frankly, I don’t find that theory convincing (though I think that the influence of another Japanese art form, kamishibai, on contemporary comics has potential), but so what? Our job isn’t to teach proved, finished intellectual ideas, but to help train students to struggle with ideas on their own, and giving them a theory that mostly works will put them in the position of critiquing (or improving) it themselves.

Another idea: rather than letting innocence and Whiteness be default categories, rather than letting them force us to defend any deviation from their norms, make them subjects. This is the brilliant move that feminists made with the invention of "masculinity studies": take the thing that has rendered itself invisible and make it the object of study. I’m still concerned that we’ll wind up with all-White reading lists, but this strategy allows us to observe the center without taking the center for granted.

Wow, that was fun! Who knew that pointing out other people’s problems and then walking away whistling would be so liberating? Thanks for the invitation, Charles, and I can’t wait to read the posts from the upcoming comics scholars.

Joe, I have to admit, I'm not likely to try to teach the origins of cartooning, beyond noting that some origin stories center on child readers and some emphatically do not!

I've taught quite a few comics classes without trying to nail down the origins of the form, and I'm content to keep on evading the question in English 392 unless it can shed light on the question of childhood.

One is that comics were adult in origin and that the shift toward a commercial field dominated by children's comics was a kind of detour, almost as if the flourishing of children's comics were some diversion from the main show, historically. I don't quite buy that.

The other is that the link between comics and childhood is one of the field's "symbolic handicaps" when it comes to critical legitimization, and yet (perhaps this is the contradictory part) is a link we should embrace rather than disavow.

So, it's as if Groensteen is denying the centrality of child readers to the larger history of comics (from Töpffer forward) but also asserting that we should unashamedly embrace the childishess or child-centeredness of comics. I can see the importance of both arguments, but it's curious how childhood becomes at once a thing inessential to the medium and a thing quite *essential* to comics studies. Huh?

Damn, maybe I WILL have to teach the origins of comics after all, or at least Groensteen's essay!

Re: the decentering of the "center" and counteracting White-centered historiography, that is an issue I'll come back to in further comments! It's big, and its ramifications are many.

Reply

Joe S. Sanders

4/14/2018 06:59:24 am

Very nice, Charles! Groensteen's comment reminds me of the early days of scholarship on fantasy, when everyone was rushing to define it as Borges, not Tolkien. There's a terror, obviously, underwriting that kind of rhetorical move, terror at not being taken seriously.

I remember reading your essay on childhood and comics in the Lion and the Unicorn about a decade ago and thinking, 'Oh good, we're finally getting over the disavowal of children in comics.' Of course, you had to publish those comments in a journal on children's literature, not comics....

Joe, on the crucial question of Whiteness in the historiography and canons of comics studies, I seems to me that that seemingly monolithic edifice of Whiteness is in fact complicated (not made easier) by a number of factors:

1. The pervasiveness of ethnic caricature in comic strips of the foundational American era, during which strips very frequently caricatured, condescended to, but also appealed to an ethnically mixed audience. The sheer inescapability of racist “ethnic” humor in the formative days of the commercial strip suggests a very complex, if still White supremacist, cultural mix—and the appeal of urban newspaper strips to a heterogeneous readership says something about negotiating the terms of Whiteness and difference—not something facile and reassuring, I’d say, but something important. In other words, there are teaching opportunities regarding race even in White-centric strips. To teach early strips, you practically have to wade into that morass. Outcault, Swinnerton, Dirks, Opper—there’s actually a lot of complicated ethnic representation there, involving immigrants and immigrants’ children, the negotiation of Whiteness, and the way the metropolis functioned as a theater of racial and social differences. And then Herriman brings a whole new dimension of complexity into this, showing how strategies of ironic self-depreciation and satire refract the whole (racist) strip tradition.

2. Early American comic books also present a field in which Whiteness is spectacularly assertive, with heavy reliance on racist caricature, and yet anxiously negotiated by many of the actual creators. I’m thinking of what scholars have had to say about Jews in America negotiating or claiming Whiteness, and also other European immigrants in groups we now think of as White but whose status was marginal or contested a century and more ago. Scholars like David Roediger and Eric Goldstein have shown how, e.g., Jewish Americans were uncertainly positioned re: Whiteness. That does nothing to mitigate the terrible racist stereotyping frequently seen in early comic books—perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t address the lack of visible self-representation by artists of color in those comic books—but it does suggest complex questions of identity.

3. Of course there are those early artists whose under-sung work suggests non-White perspectives and queer perspectives—Matt Baker, for example. It would be disingenuous to argue that the presence of such creators redeems the entire field or redresses its lopsided Whiteness, but those creators are important.

4. We should be alert to the ways that comic art (as Phil Nel seems to argue in Was the Cat in the Hat Black?) can deracinate and mystify the racist origins of certain characters and images—e.g., through the use of schematized “animal” characters. Spiegelman reasserts the racism behind these strategies in Maus, which one reason Maus is genius, yes?

5. One thing I’ll go into more later is that history need not be taught chronologically, and a course, even one with a lot of historiographic heavy lifting to do, need not begin in historicist mode. For my ENGL 392, I lean toward doing what I’ve done in other course at the start: namely, going with a contemporary example or examples, using that to introduce analytical perspectives, and then, and only then, working backwards into the history. I’m thinking about the way my SF and Fantasy courses have not started out with history but with current examples, and then sort of reverse-engineered those to bring forth history (I’ll say more about this in a follow-up post). I do try to find contemporary points of reference before diving into histories or genealogies.

We might consider, for example, how Yang and Liew’s The Shadow Hero could be read with and against, say, late 30s-early 40s representations of Chinese (and more generally Asian) characters in Batman comics, Captain America comics, etc. That’s not to say that we should take a presentist bias or fall into some teleological or developmental narrative where “everything is better now.” But present/past dialogue could be one way to make the historical issues gripping.

Reply

Joe S. Sanders

4/16/2018 10:48:45 pm

Charles! Excellent replies. How do you get all of your writing done when you're spending fabulous thoughts like these in the comments section of drivel such as mine?

I don't have much to add; I'll just amplify three points.

1) Comics and caricature. Every time I teach comics, this point emerges organically, and sometimes I'll even try to delay its arrival just to see how long I can keep it out. Cartooning does seem to incline toward a visual style that aligns with caricature...so does that mean that there is something at the centre of comics itself that is problematic? I'm having a hard time thinking otherwise.

2) Jewish people in comics: I have approached and veered away from this topic more times than I am comfortable admitting. Jews as represented in comics, Jewish people as creators of comics, it's such a rich area of study, especially considering the strange fictions connecting 'race' and Jewish identity, but I'm utterly unqualified to lead a discussion about it.

3) I love, love The Shadow Hero. I like teaching American Born Chinese because its strengths and deep problems provoke fantastic conversations, and I think Boxers & Saints is an artistic and intellectual triumph, but Shadow Hero is my favorite Gene Luen Yang.

Yours as always,

Reply

Gwen Tarbox

4/17/2018 01:59:45 am

Representation of subject positions even closely aligned with one’s own is problematic. When teaching this subject, I like to use a couple of pages from the short, independently published comic Drawn Together, co-created by Lucy Knisley and Erika Moen, in which they draw themselves talking about how depicting their own gender identities as gender fluid and gender queer persons is easy, but depicting even their closest LGBTQA friends is fraught with difficulties. Some day, I’d like to write on representation in depth because it raises so very many questions about the acts of seeing, classifying, and rendering the world outside ourselves. There’s nothing like ontology and insomnia to add verve to your comments section, Charles!

Representation IS dicey. Honestly, I think fiction is forever fumbling, forever getting things wrong. It seems to me that authenticity in representation is achieved dialogically, that is, in the dialogue among texts, readers, and creators. It's a process.

Cartoonist Mari Naomi gave a talk at my campus about two years back in which she stressed the importance of research when depicting diverse identities in storytelling. I think that's important to bear in mind: not only informational nonfiction, and not only historical fiction, require research. Even stories close to home, with contemporary settings and characters, may require research, formally or informally.

Now, I don't believe fiction should be bound by a metaphysics of authenticity, or by the tenets of realism. I also don't think it's a bad thing when fiction reaches out and takes risks in terms of cultural representation (I'm thinking here of the discussion surrounding Wes Anderson's latest film, Isle of Dogs, which I dug but which many other viewers have strongly criticized). But I do think it's important to avoid thoughtlessly reproducing representations that assign or sustain inequitable, unjust, or discriminatory power relations. That's why I think research is so important.

A great many stories, even great stories, fail at some level, or are based on one-dimensional characterizations (functionaries or actants rather than credible characters). Again, it may take dialogic exchange among texts to bring about understanding, since one text is not likely to get everything "right." Consider for example the flattening of religious sentiment in Satrapi's Persepolis, or the near-disappearance of the parents in Yang's American Born Chinese, or the frankly bitter treatment of the parents in Small's Stitches. Every one of those texts features some one-dimensional functionaries whose stories might have been told multi-dimensionally in another text from another POV. That's not a sign that they should be condemned, but simply a reminder that we need myriad stories, and conversations about stories, not just one.

Let that not be interpreted as a free pass for texts that are viciously, stupidly flat, or thoughtless!

Joe, I'll echo you on The Shadow Hero, though I think Boxers & Saints is my favorite so far: such a gutsy, unstable, destabilizing project, so divided and yet so brave and smart.

Re: Jewish people in comics, there is a wealth of scholarship there, and I had some of that in mind in my earlier comment (Brod, Buhle, Fingeroth, Kaplan, etc.). Are you familiar with Martin Lund's "Re-Constructing the Man of Steel: Superman 1938–1941, Jewish American History, and the Invention of the Jewish–Comics Connection" (Palgrave, 2016)?

I too feel unqualified to intervene in that debate, but it means a lot for the historiography of comic books (and particularly of the superhero).

Re: comics and caricature, the issue is vexed. I tried to write about it years ago (Will Eisner encouraged me to publish on it!). I hope and expect that there will be an outpouring of new scholarship on the issue. Two books I have found useful on this issue are "The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art" by Mary Cowling (Cambridge UP, 1989) and "No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity," edited by the late Angela Rosenthal (Dartmouth, 2015).

Töpffer's "Essay on Physiognomy" (1845) is also relevant. In it, Töpffer expresses skepticism about the supposed science of physiognomy (Cowling, above, discusses physiognomy and phrenology, the Victorian pseudo-sciences of judging character by looks). However, Töpffer does propose a series of graphic "types"; that is, he gives galleries of stereotypic cartoon faces. It's less an essay about "scientific" physiognomy and more about the semiotics of cartooning. (Spiegelman's long-ago interview with Andrea Juno, now collected in Witek's book, Art Spiegelman: Conversations, goes into this.)